BLOOD SUCKING MANIACS
a stunning multi-generational multi-genre piece of heart
CJ Music Review
by Adam Van Winkle
I listened to a radio interview with James McMurtry somewhere online in the isolated days of COVID where he was asked if it was hard to make the choice to try to make it as a singer and songwriter. He said it was always a pathway he could envision because his dad, legendary Texas novelist Larry McMurtry, had already broken the family mold and left the ranch to be an artist. James McMurtry’s son, Curtis, is a talented musician in his own right.
Blood Sucking Maniacs is the eponymous album from another Texas artist that broke a mold or two, Terry Allen, and his family: his wife and talented actress, Jo Harvey Allen, his sons, Bukka and Bale, and his grandsons, Kru, Sled and Calder. Each offers unique lyrics, spoken-word poetry, instrumentals and chants on this 22-track gem. Terry Allen’s Panhandle Mystery Band veteran sidemen Lloyd Maines, Charlie Sexton, and Richard Bowden alongside Charlie’s brother Will Sexton bring their always superb playing as well.
A family of artists indeed.
Perhaps the most poignant point on such a family band collaboration are the appearances of the youngest and oldest on the album: Terry and Jo Harvey Allen’s great grandson Lucky Marlo and fragmentary cassette recordings of Terry’s mother, Pauline, a virtuosic barrelhouse piano player.
Lucky Marlo’s ultrasound heartbeat opens and closes the record. Pauline Allen’s pieces, “Barrellhouse” which shares the opening track with Lucky Marlo, and “Blues” (W.C. Handy’s “The St. Louis Blues”)–a motif in Terry Allen’s radio play, Dugout, and, Terry has claimed, the only song she ever taught her son to play on piano–appears at about the midway point. Pauline as opener and center support post is fitting. She is the artist who broke the mold, the artist from which this family of artists flows.
Many will flock to listen when this album drops on April 24th from Paradise of Bachelors because they, like me, are avid Terry Allen fans. Maybe, like me, they discovered his art and writing because they discovered his music first. Allen fans are fierce, and we know very well that he is a generational songwriter on par with the very best. And a handful of the songs–the titular “Blood Sucking Maniacs,” a new version of “Bloodlines,” “Red Leg Boy,” a clear nod to Terry’s father, also Sled, and “Family Tree”–are Terry Allen penned numbers.
But it would be a mistake to approach this as simply a new Terry Allen album, and to focus only on those songs would fail to acknowledge the equally exciting contributions from the rest of this lot. Jo Harvey penned several poems and songs herein, including “Let It All In” co-written by the great Susanna Clark, wife of Terry’s longtime friend Guy Clark. Add to that the poetry and songs contributed by Bukka, Bale, Sled, and Calder and you’ve got a remarkable collection of writers.
Indeed, instead of approaching this work as a Terry Allen album, perhaps it is most fruitful to approach it as something more like a multi-media art installation. After all it stimulates on many levels: there’s song, poetry, specters of the past audible-ized, in utero heartbeats that eye the future, even something like laser show style instrumentation.
It all works together as something like a sensational assault. It’s arrangement provides an exhibition tunnel that showcases reflections on time, family and place. And it’s one that makes you want to start right back at the beginning as soon as you exit–highlighted by that same pulsing blood track at the beginning and end.
Blood is certainly the central connection here. Blood Sucking Maniacs is an album title, a song title, and a band name.
Terry Allen’s “Bloodlines” gets new life here. I’m always fascinated with my sons’ reactions to music. The six-year old, a young guitar player himself, and the five-year old were riding in the back seat one Sunday morning on a quick trip to the store. I decided to play them my church music. I put on the Bloodlines album and when the opening title track, “Bloodlines (I)” hit, they both fell into awed silence. As the album rolled into “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” it felt like I was witnessing them really listen to an album, an artist for the first time. I dare say his version here at 82 has even more reverence than it did when he sang it approaching 40.
In “A Pogo is a Logo,” a psychedelic guitar and drum driven spoken-word piece by Bale Allen, he muses, I’d wager accurately, “Put us all in a blender and mix us all up/And the color you’ll get is the color of blood.”
Calder Allen nods to grandpa’s song in “Arroyo Nights” as he sings, “It’s the only time my soul feels this safe/Arroyo nights in the wintertime/Wrapped in neon lights/As the bloodlines say their grace.”
Terry gets direct with it on “Family Tree”: “A song rolls/Through the family tree/And blood flows/Through the roots of you and me.” Songs, like blood, flow here from Pauline to Terry, from Terry and Jo Harvey to Bukka and Bale, from Bukka and Bale down to Sled, Calder and Kru, and on down to Lucky Marlo.
And it flows for you and me. Whatever our family songs play out as. From my dad to me to my boys, listening to Terry Allen’s gospel in the back seat.
I recently got a chance to see Terry and Jo Harvey and Bukka and Bale, along with Charlie Sexton, Richard Bowden and Davis McLarty, perform at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. For me, it was church. There was parable, song, poetry and the stained-glass windows of Terry’s art projecting on the back wall of the stage. From the second row it was completely immersive.
And that’s just what this album is. It’s immersive. Wrapping yourself in this family band's collection is like being wrapped in an old family blanket or wearing your dad’s well-worn jacket. It hits your nostalgia nerves. And nostalgia is happiness (literally, your brain releases chemicals that give nostalgia that good gooey feeling).
As I moved through this collection of spoken-word, instrumentation, barrelhouse jazz, Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band’s special brand of art-country, traditionals, something kin to a laid-back alternative rock, singer-songwriting chops, and clinical sounds, I realized that the blood sucking here is love and art. They are Blood Sucking Maniacs because they feed off of the love and art that is passed from generation to generation, blood to blood.
It takes a hell of a piece of music to bring us back to ourselves, but Blood Sucking Maniacs will do it. Listen and try not to think about the rivers that flow into you and out of you. Listen to it and try not to be grateful for them rivers.
That’s a hell of an achievement from the Allen crew. And Blood Sucking Maniacs is a hell of an album.
Out April 24th from Paradise of Bachelors.
a stunning multi-generational multi-genre piece of heart
CJ Music Review
by Adam Van Winkle
I listened to a radio interview with James McMurtry somewhere online in the isolated days of COVID where he was asked if it was hard to make the choice to try to make it as a singer and songwriter. He said it was always a pathway he could envision because his dad, legendary Texas novelist Larry McMurtry, had already broken the family mold and left the ranch to be an artist. James McMurtry’s son, Curtis, is a talented musician in his own right.
Blood Sucking Maniacs is the eponymous album from another Texas artist that broke a mold or two, Terry Allen, and his family: his wife and talented actress, Jo Harvey Allen, his sons, Bukka and Bale, and his grandsons, Kru, Sled and Calder. Each offers unique lyrics, spoken-word poetry, instrumentals and chants on this 22-track gem. Terry Allen’s Panhandle Mystery Band veteran sidemen Lloyd Maines, Charlie Sexton, and Richard Bowden alongside Charlie’s brother Will Sexton bring their always superb playing as well.
A family of artists indeed.
Perhaps the most poignant point on such a family band collaboration are the appearances of the youngest and oldest on the album: Terry and Jo Harvey Allen’s great grandson Lucky Marlo and fragmentary cassette recordings of Terry’s mother, Pauline, a virtuosic barrelhouse piano player.
Lucky Marlo’s ultrasound heartbeat opens and closes the record. Pauline Allen’s pieces, “Barrellhouse” which shares the opening track with Lucky Marlo, and “Blues” (W.C. Handy’s “The St. Louis Blues”)–a motif in Terry Allen’s radio play, Dugout, and, Terry has claimed, the only song she ever taught her son to play on piano–appears at about the midway point. Pauline as opener and center support post is fitting. She is the artist who broke the mold, the artist from which this family of artists flows.
Many will flock to listen when this album drops on April 24th from Paradise of Bachelors because they, like me, are avid Terry Allen fans. Maybe, like me, they discovered his art and writing because they discovered his music first. Allen fans are fierce, and we know very well that he is a generational songwriter on par with the very best. And a handful of the songs–the titular “Blood Sucking Maniacs,” a new version of “Bloodlines,” “Red Leg Boy,” a clear nod to Terry’s father, also Sled, and “Family Tree”–are Terry Allen penned numbers.
But it would be a mistake to approach this as simply a new Terry Allen album, and to focus only on those songs would fail to acknowledge the equally exciting contributions from the rest of this lot. Jo Harvey penned several poems and songs herein, including “Let It All In” co-written by the great Susanna Clark, wife of Terry’s longtime friend Guy Clark. Add to that the poetry and songs contributed by Bukka, Bale, Sled, and Calder and you’ve got a remarkable collection of writers.
Indeed, instead of approaching this work as a Terry Allen album, perhaps it is most fruitful to approach it as something more like a multi-media art installation. After all it stimulates on many levels: there’s song, poetry, specters of the past audible-ized, in utero heartbeats that eye the future, even something like laser show style instrumentation.
It all works together as something like a sensational assault. It’s arrangement provides an exhibition tunnel that showcases reflections on time, family and place. And it’s one that makes you want to start right back at the beginning as soon as you exit–highlighted by that same pulsing blood track at the beginning and end.
Blood is certainly the central connection here. Blood Sucking Maniacs is an album title, a song title, and a band name.
Terry Allen’s “Bloodlines” gets new life here. I’m always fascinated with my sons’ reactions to music. The six-year old, a young guitar player himself, and the five-year old were riding in the back seat one Sunday morning on a quick trip to the store. I decided to play them my church music. I put on the Bloodlines album and when the opening title track, “Bloodlines (I)” hit, they both fell into awed silence. As the album rolled into “Gimme a Ride to Heaven Boy” it felt like I was witnessing them really listen to an album, an artist for the first time. I dare say his version here at 82 has even more reverence than it did when he sang it approaching 40.
In “A Pogo is a Logo,” a psychedelic guitar and drum driven spoken-word piece by Bale Allen, he muses, I’d wager accurately, “Put us all in a blender and mix us all up/And the color you’ll get is the color of blood.”
Calder Allen nods to grandpa’s song in “Arroyo Nights” as he sings, “It’s the only time my soul feels this safe/Arroyo nights in the wintertime/Wrapped in neon lights/As the bloodlines say their grace.”
Terry gets direct with it on “Family Tree”: “A song rolls/Through the family tree/And blood flows/Through the roots of you and me.” Songs, like blood, flow here from Pauline to Terry, from Terry and Jo Harvey to Bukka and Bale, from Bukka and Bale down to Sled, Calder and Kru, and on down to Lucky Marlo.
And it flows for you and me. Whatever our family songs play out as. From my dad to me to my boys, listening to Terry Allen’s gospel in the back seat.
I recently got a chance to see Terry and Jo Harvey and Bukka and Bale, along with Charlie Sexton, Richard Bowden and Davis McLarty, perform at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. For me, it was church. There was parable, song, poetry and the stained-glass windows of Terry’s art projecting on the back wall of the stage. From the second row it was completely immersive.
And that’s just what this album is. It’s immersive. Wrapping yourself in this family band's collection is like being wrapped in an old family blanket or wearing your dad’s well-worn jacket. It hits your nostalgia nerves. And nostalgia is happiness (literally, your brain releases chemicals that give nostalgia that good gooey feeling).
As I moved through this collection of spoken-word, instrumentation, barrelhouse jazz, Terry Allen and the Panhandle Mystery Band’s special brand of art-country, traditionals, something kin to a laid-back alternative rock, singer-songwriting chops, and clinical sounds, I realized that the blood sucking here is love and art. They are Blood Sucking Maniacs because they feed off of the love and art that is passed from generation to generation, blood to blood.
It takes a hell of a piece of music to bring us back to ourselves, but Blood Sucking Maniacs will do it. Listen and try not to think about the rivers that flow into you and out of you. Listen to it and try not to be grateful for them rivers.
That’s a hell of an achievement from the Allen crew. And Blood Sucking Maniacs is a hell of an album.
Out April 24th from Paradise of Bachelors.
Photo credits: Barbara FG (courtesy Paradise of Bachelors)